He had been educated at one of the great English universities, and was a good scholar, though he had been forced to leave the university, and, as report went, England too, for some great irregularity.
He had money, and a share in his brother-in-law's station, although he never stayed there many months in the year.

He was always away at some mischief or another.

No horse-race or prize-fight could go on without him, and he himself never left one of these last-mentioned gatherings without finding some one to try conclusions with him.

Beside this, he was a great writer and singer of comic songs, and a consummate horseman.
One fine day he came back to his brother's station in serious trouble.
Whether he had mistaken another man's horse for his own or not, I cannot say; but, at all events, he announced that a warrant was out against him for horse-stealing, and that he must go into hiding.

So he took up his quarters at a little hut of his brother-in-law's, on the ranges, inhabited only by a stockkeeper and a black boy, and kept a young lubra in pay to watch down the glen for the police.
One morning she came running into the hut, breathless, to say that a lieutenant and three troopers were riding towards the hut.